Museum & Gallery Listings for Feb. 14-20

Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art. A searchable guide to these and many other art shows is at nytimes.com/events.

Museums

Brooklyn Museum: ‘Divine Felines: Cats of Ancient Egypt’ (through December 2014) If your dream of heaven is eternity spent with the pets you love, this show is for you. All of its 30 objects, sifted from the museum’s renowned Egyptian collection, are of cats, big and little, feral and tame, celestial and not. Whether cast in bronze or carved in stone, their forms and personalities were meant to outlast time, and so they have. 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, 718-638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Holland Cotter)

★ Brooklyn Museum: ‘Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey’ (through March 9) For the past decade and a half, Wangechi Mutu, born in Kenya and based in New York, has been producing large-scale figurative collages as politically nuanced as they are ravishing. Since she first started to show them in the late 1990s, they have grown more complex and detailed, and we’re seeing them at what has to be some kind of peak moment in this pithy traveling survey. 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, 718-638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Cotter)

★ Frick Collection: ‘Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes From the Hill Collection’ (through June 15) This sensational, beautifully presented show of 33 late-15th- to early-18th-century bronzes reflects a taste for historically important, big-statement examples in exceptional condition. They vividly reflect the Renaissance’s new interest in antiquity and the human form while encouraging concentration on emotional expression, refined details (great hair!), struggling or relaxed figures and varied patinas. Works by the reigning geniuses Giambologna, Susini and the lesser-known Piamontini dominate, further enlivened by a handful of old master and late-20th-century paintings from the Hill collection. 1 East 70th Street, Manhattan, 212-288-0700, frick.org. (Roberta Smith)

★ Guggenheim Museum: ‘Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video’ (through May 14) Color and class are still the great divides in American culture, and few artists have surveyed them as subtly and incisively as Carrie Mae Weems, whose traveling 30-year retrospective has arrived at the Guggenheim. From its early candid family photographs, through series of pictures that track the Africa in African-American, to work that probes, over decades, what it means to be black, female and in charge of your life, it’s a ripe, questioning and beautiful show. All the more galling, then, that this museum has cut it down to nearly half its original size and split it between two floors of annex galleries, making an exhibition that should have filled the main-event rotunda into a secondary attraction. 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, 212-423-3500, guggenheim.org. (Cotter)

International Center of Photography: ‘Capa in Color’ (through May 4) Robert Capa first worked with color in 1938, though he only began shooting regularly in color in 1941. This exhibition includes more than 100 contemporary inkjet prints, a fraction of the roughly 4,200 color transparencies held in the center’s Capa Archive. Sections of the exhibition include photographs of postwar Paris with spectators at the Longchamp racetrack, fashion models, people sitting in cafes. Black and white remained the standard for war photography as well as art during this time, however, and color during Capa’s period was still for commerce, amateurs, leisure — and stories featuring women. 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street, 212-857-0000, icp.org. (Martha Schwendener)

International Center of Photography: ‘What Is a Photograph?’ (through May 4) This exhibition is supposed to address a good question: What is photography in today’s digital age with its mind-boggling new smorgasbord of ways to create and disseminate machine-made images? It brings together works from the past four decades by 21 artists who have used photography to ponder the nature of photography itself. But it’s a strangely blinkered and backward-looking show. Most of what is on view has more to do with photography’s analog past than with its cybernetic future. 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street, 212-857-0000, icp.org. (Ken Johnson)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘The American West in Bronze, 1850-1925’ (through April 13) This intriguing and spiritually troubling show presents 65 mostly pedestal-scale sculptures representing standard themes of the old American West: cowboys, Indians and wild animals. It includes famous practitioners of the genre like Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell, as well as 26 others. Nearly all the sculptures are in a mode of three-dimensional illustrative realism and tend heavily to romantic idealization. There’s the rub: The real history of the conquest of the West by white folks was much worse than what these artists imagined in their very popular works. 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Antonio Canova: The Seven Last Works’ (through April 27) At the end of his life Antonio Canova (1757-1822) produced this show’s seven rectangular plaster reliefs for a Neo-Classical church he designed and financed for his hometown, Possagno, Italy. Unlike his best known sculptures, they are not remotely erotic or even particularly sensual, and they have nothing to do with the Greek mythology. Rather, they illustrate biblical stories: four from the Book of Genesis and three revolving around the birth of Jesus. They have their moments, but on the whole it doesn’t look like Christianity was a good influence on Canova’s creative imagination. 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris’ (through May 4) As an official city photographer working under Napoleon III and his controversial urban planner, Baron Haussmann, Charles Marville recorded some 425 views of narrow, picturesque streets that were to be replaced by Haussmann’s grand boulevards. Familiar images from that series are among the 100 or so photographs in this show, and they will doubtless be the main draw for visitors eager for a glimpse of a bygone Paris. But the curators also explore Marville’s background in illustration and what little we know of his biography. He comes across as a cleareyed cartographer who never quite let go of the illustrator’s imperative to make a beautiful, cohesive picture. 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Karen Rosenberg)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘The Flowering of Edo Period Painting: Japanese Masterworks from the Feinberg Collection’ (through Sept. 7) The Met’s Japanese galleries have been pulling crowds with a recent series of theme-based exhibitions. It now takes on a different challenge: how to present a cogent narrative within the parameters of a private collection. Given the material, it would have been hard to go wrong. What a collection this is. And what histories, new and old, it holds. Gleaming gold landscape screens, painted fans, painted views into urban brothels: The show is a magnetic beauty. 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Cotter)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China’ (through April 6) This museum’s first survey of recent Chinese art uses the lens of the culture’s ancient brush and ink tradition so basic to its landscape painting and calligraphy. It doesn’t always work. The show endures a scattered installation, includes overly refined displays of empty skill and wanders off message in spots, especially with several sculptures that don’t seem to belong here. But a few moments of visual life and many interesting questions about the weight of the old on the new make it worthwhile. 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Jewels By JAR’ (through March 9) Crowd-pleasers needn’t represent lowered curatorial standards in terms of subject and execution, but this one does. It packs 400 efforts by the New York-born, Paris-based high-society jeweler, Joel Arthur Rosenthal (JAR), into a very dark gallery with insufficient labeling or historical backup. Large pave brooches, usually of flowers, abound; too many pieces date from 2010 or later. There are certainly redeeming works, but the show cries out for editing, scholarly support and better viewing conditions. Artist and audience are left hanging, with the museum’s mercenary agenda in full view. 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Piero della Francesa: Personal Encounters’ (through March 30) None of the four works in this deceptively low-impact show are among Piero della Francesca’s most celebrated. But they are all the devotional paintings for private clients Piero is known to have made, and this show is the first to bring them all together. Two picture Saint Jerome in his wilderness retreat and two portray the Madonna and Child, one of which is thought to be Piero’s earliest known painting and the other among his last. As marriages of old religious faith and new forms of empirical consciousness, they are marvelous thought provokers. 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Silla: Korea’s Golden Kingdom’ (through Feb. 23) This intriguing show presents more than 130 objects from Silla, a kingdom that dominated the Korean peninsula in the seventh and eighth centuries. The first two of three sections includes gold jewelry, formally austere pottery, glassware and other objects excavated from mound shaped, earth-covered tombs in the city of Gyeongju. The third section displays sculpture made after Buddhism was adopted as the state religion around 530. Among the most captivating is a beautiful three-foot-high, gilt bronze sculpture of a young Bodhisattva, which, like a number of other works in the show, has been designated a Korean National Treasure. 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Venetian Glass by Carlo Scarpa: The Venini Company, 1932-1947’ (through March 2) Before he turned to architecture, Carlo Scarpa (1906-78) designed glass vessels, achieving a lifetime’s worth of beauty and innovation in a short, remarkable burst of creativity. His achievement is honored with this sublime exhibition of nearly 300 of his splendidly sculptural, radiantly colored, ingeniously patterned vessels. They have an inspiring wholeness: process, form and decoration become a single thing; art, craft and science merge. And content of the non-narrative, experiential kind abounds. 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time’ (through May 11) Everything is on the move in this mini-theater-cum-power-plant of an installation. In wraparound videos, metronomes pound. Clock-faces spin, spewing trails of stars. Drawings draw and erase themselves. Maps of Africa appear and disappear. White-coated figures mix potions amid giant watch springs. At the center of the gallery a wooden contraption pumps away like an energy source. A collaboration between Mr. Kentridge, who is based in South Africa, and Peter L. Galison, a science historian at Harvard, the piece refers to the European colonial experiment, which strove to shape other cultures to its own concepts of reality, only to find that those cultures had different, resistant, assertive realities of their own. 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Cotter)

Morgan Library and Museum: ‘Visions and Nightmares: Four Centuries of Spanish Drawings’ (through May 11) Skipping from 16th-century church commissions to Goya in just 25 objects, the Morgan’s first show of Spanish drawings is necessarily awkward. But it delivers on the promise of its title, serving up heavenly apparitions and wicked phantasms aplenty. Highlights include a red chalk drawing of the satyr Marsyas by José de Ribera, an “Immaculate Conception” by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, several late Goya drawings, and a lavishly illustrated 1780 edition of “Don Quixote.” 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, 212-685-0008, themorgan.org. (Rosenberg)

★ Museum of Arts and Design: ‘Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital’ (through June 1) If you haven’t quite wrapped your head around the concept of 3-D printing, or haven’t yet had a digital scanner wrap itself around you, now you can do both in this survey of computer-assisted art, architecture and design. The show looks at art made since 2005 and fills nearly three floors, including many irresistible interactive projects. Its ideas may not be entirely new; the Museum of Modern Art’s 2008 exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” covered much of the same territory, but there’s something to be said for this more down-to-earth, production-focused exhibition. 2 Columbus Circle, 212-299-7777, madmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)

★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio’ (through Oct. 5) This most lively if repetitive overview traces the history of photography as the Modern never has — with images taken in the studio rather than out in the world. Its roughly 180 works span 160 years and represent some 90 portraitists, commercial photographers, lovers of still life, darkroom experimenters, Conceptual artists and several generations of postmodernists. Including film and video, it offers much to look at, but dwells too much in the past, becoming increasingly blinkered and cautious as it approaches the present. 212-708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)

Museum of Modern Art: ‘Designing Modern Women 1890-1990’ (through Sept. 21) Shoehorned into half the museum’s design department, this conversation-starting display of objects from MoMA’s permanent collection features items designed by more than 60 women, many of whom worked with male partners. Some, like Marianne Brandt and Eileen Gray, are well known to design aficionados, but most will be unfamiliar to a general audience. Most objects were created for domestic consumption. The pièce de résistance is a kitchen designed by Charlotte Perriand for the apartments in Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, France. 212-708-9400, moma.org. (Johnson)

Museum of Modern Art: ‘Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New’ (through April 21) Ileana Sonnabend, who died in 2007 at 92, was one of the most foresighted art dealers of the late 20th century. This modest-size exhibition, made up of work she either owned or showed in her gallery, gives a sense of the range of her interests, from Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons. 212-708-9400, moma.org. (Cotter)

★ Museum of Modern Art: Isa Genzken: ‘Retrospective’ (through March 10) This prolific German sculptor — for whom New York and its skyscrapers are a major source of inspiration — receives her first comprehensive museum survey in this country. A grand, glamorous and sometimes grating 40-year overview, it traces her progress from idiosyncratic Minimalist monoliths to the distinctive, often architectonic, assemblages she began making in 1997 from cheesy materials and objects, concocting a raw, unapologetic beauty and a weirdly elliptical if literal-minded social commentary, often about the United States, power and war. 212-708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)

★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Walker Evans: American Photographs’ (through March 9) In 1938, the Museum of Modern Art mounted its first one-person photography exhibition: “American Photographs,” by Walker Evans. This gripping, 75th-anniversary reprise of that show presents more than 50 images from that body of work. It is accompanied by a reissue of the original catalog, which includes a wonderfully insightful essay by Evans’s friend and supporter Lincoln Kirstein. Together, the show and the book reverberate now in a time when the idea of America is subject to debates as fractious and far-reaching as at any time since the Civil War. 212-708-9400, moma.org. (Johnson)

Museum of the City of New York: ‘City as Canvas: Graffiti Art from the Martin Wong Collection’ (through Aug. 24) Drawn from a collection of graffiti-related materials assembled by the artist Martin Wong, this fascinating show and its indispensable catalog chronicle the rise and fall of the calligraphic, illegal art form known as “wild style” graffiti in New York in the 1970s and ’80s. Presenting about 150 paintings, drawings, sketchbooks and documentary photographs, it features works by most of the underground movement’s stars, including Daze (given name Chris Ellis), Dondi (Donald White), Futura 2000 (Leonard McGurr) and Lady Pink (Sandra Fabara). Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, 212-534-1672, mcny.org. (Johnson)

Museum of the City of New York: ‘Gilded New York’ (continuing) This period-piece of a show revolves around the ritual of the fancy-dress ball: an occasion for lavish expenditures by both host and guests. The gallery, upholstered in eggplant-colored brocade and stuffed with silver and porcelain, could serve as a set for the latest Wharton adaptation or Julian Fellowes’s much-anticipated American follow-up to “Downton Abbey.” Two mannequins wearing evening dresses by Maison Worth of Paris have been posed conversationally before a fireplace surround of Italian marble; one of them is clad in the sparkling “Electric Light” dress, festooned with silver bullion, worn by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt II at the Vanderbilt Ball of 1883. In the catalog, and just outside the gallery, photographs show guests at other balls dressed (with no apparent irony) as kings, queens and courtiers from Versailles. Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, 212-534-1672, mcny.org. (Rosenberg)

★ New-York Historical Society: ‘The Armory Show at 100: Modern Art and Revolution’ (through Feb. 23) The International Exhibition of Modern Art, otherwise known as the Armory Show, woke American art from its provincial slumbers a century ago. Was it a good thing or a bad thing, and is there any reason to care about it now? With more than 100 works from the original exhibition by American and European artists and a big, richly illuminating catalog, “The Armory Show at 100” offers an excellent opportunity to ponder such questions. 170 Central Park West, at 77th Street, 212-873-3400, nyhistory.org. (Johnson)

New-York Historical Society: ‘Beauty’s Legacy: Gilded Age Portraits in America’ (through March 9) Rich in context and character-driven, this show of society portraits from the Gilded Age offers plenty of information on the New York social set known as Mrs. Astor’s 400. Highlights include Theobald Chartran’s painting of James Hazen Hyde, the Equitable Insurance Company heir whose come-hither stare is conspicuously modeled on Bronzino’s “Portrait of a Young Man,” and watercolor-on-ivory miniatures from the collection of Peter Marié that show society women in costume from the latest ball. 170 Central Park West, at 77th Street, 212-873-3400, nyhistory.org. (Rosenberg)

Queens Museum of Art: Peter Schumann ‘The Shatterer’ (through March 30) A recent expansion has doubled the size of the Queens Museum. Of five celebratory new shows, the largest and most moving is the solo museum debut of Peter Schumann, the founder and director of Bread and Puppet Theater, which is 50 years old this year. The show demonstrates how thoroughly Bread and Puppet is his creation. Its down-value look and activist ethos are evident in everything, including the black house-paint mural he has brushed, single-handedly, across one of the museum’s wall and the hand-printed, hand-bound books he has placed in the gallery he designates as chapel and library. Every inch of this room is covered with figures and words: angels and ogres, exhortations and condemnations, art for one and for all, straight from the hand, right to the moral core. Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, 718-592-9700, queensmuseum.org. (Cotter)

★ Studio Museum in Harlem: ‘Carrie Mae Weems: The Museum Series’ (through June 29) A set of recent pictures by Carrie Mae Weems are on view here as a supplement to the Guggenheim Museum’s “Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video” exhibition. These images show the artist dwarfed by the facades of international art institutions — the Louvre, the Tate Modern, and so on — which, to quote the Studio Museum news release, “affirm or reject certain histories through their collecting or display decisions. 144 West 125th Street, Harlem, 212-864-4500, studiomuseum.org. (Cotter)

★ Studio Museum in Harlem: ‘The Shadows Took Shape’ (through March 9) Space is definitely the place in this lively group exhibition devoted to Afrofuturism, a contemporary art trend that takes the ultra-free-jazz musician Sun Ra as its patron saint and locates itself in a universe where racial and ethnic identities float free from stereotypes without losing track of the histories that created them. William Villalongo sets African sculpture and modernist painting soaring together among the stars; the Kenyan artist Wanuri Kahiu films ecological cataclysm and renewal in ages to come; William Cordova, who lives in New York and Lima, Peru, recreates the Millennium Falcon from “Star Wars,” now equipped with a cultural studies library. 144 West 125th Street, 212-864-4500, studiomuseum.org. (Cotter)

Galleries: Chelsea

★ Arahmaiani: ‘Fertility of the Mind’ (through Feb. 22) The first New York solo show for the Indonesian artist Arahmaiani Feisal, who uses only her first name, is a condensed, bare-bones retrospective. The artist was raised Muslim, though has taken the hybrid nature of Indonesian Islam, with its roots in Buddhism, Hinduism and animism, to mix images from across the religious spectrum. And her wide travels have made her a world citizen. From the start she has approached art as form of political activism used to shake up orthodoxies of faith, gender and class in a country that has experienced increasing political repression and bloody religious sectarianism. Tyler Rollins Fine Art, 529 West 20th Street, 212-229-9100, trfineart.com. (Cotter)

★ Andrew Moore: ‘Dirt Meridian’ (through Feb. 22) This series of large color photographs documents the devastation — by abandonment and drought — of rural Nebraska. The images of hollow houses, crumbling barns, desolate trees and a graffiti-filled blackboard might qualify as ruin porn if they didn’t bring such heart-rending news of an existence that was solitary in the best of times. “The Murray House, Sears Roebuck Rockfaced Wizard No. 52, Sheridan County, Nebraska,” might almost be a painting by Salvador Dalí, had he been an American Regionalist. Yancey Richardson Gallery, 525 West 22nd Street, 646-230-9610, yanceyrichardson.com. (Smith)

Richard Serra: ‘New Sculpture’ (through March 15) In this show, Richard Serra continues along the road that emerged from the hugely successful “Torqued Ellipses” of the 1990s, but also circles back to his earlier oeuvre. Here you have the Serra of the ’60s and ’70s, revised and updated: heavy rectilinear plates and cubes fabricated in steel rather than lead, his signature material in the ’60s. 555 West 24th Street, 212-741-1111, gagosian.com. (Schwendener)

‘Simplest Means’ (through Feb. 22) This suggestive exhibition presents works by eight contemporary artists along with a selection of useful objects produced by Shakers mostly in the 19th century. The connection is a predilection for simplicity and transparency. Shaker pieces include an intricately constructed wooden chip fork and a finely woven straw bonnet. Among works by the artists are geometric compositions painted by Don Voisine; a dusky painting of a broom and dustpan by Joshua Marsh; and loops and slender lengths of wood carved by Seth Koen. Jeff Bailey Gallery, 625 West 27th Street, 212-989-0156, baileygallery.com. (Johnson)

★ ‘The Age of Small Things’ (through Feb. 23) This delightful, cheerfully eclectic grab bag of a show presents more than 50 small paintings, drawings and three-dimensional pieces from the mid-17th century to the present by 42 artists. Francis Picabia, Philip Guston, Vija Celmins and John Wesley are among the numerous boldface names represented. Some of the most arresting things are by unknown 19th-century creators, including Victorian mourning paper weights in the form of miniature books and intricate, cut-paper works representing a hand holding a heart. Dodge Gallery, 15 Rivington Street, Lower East Side, 212-228-5122, dodge-gallery.com. (Johnson)

Guy Ben Ner (through March 8) “Soundtrack” (2013), the centerpiece of this show, takes a scene from Steven Spielberg’s 2005 movie “War of the Worlds” as a “ready-made” soundtrack and pairs it with footage shot in Mr. Ben Ner’s kitchen in Tel Aviv. Like Tom Cruise’s character in that movie, Mr. Ben Ner’s children from his first marriage play a pivotal role in “Soundtrack,” billed alongside the cute baby from his second marriage. The artist’s family situation would be none of our business except that we’ve literally watched his kids grow up in his oeuvre. In that sense, “Soundtrack” serves as an art analogue to “War of the Worlds” in which familial bliss is ruptured and plays itself out on embattled ground. Postmasters, 54 Franklin Street, TriBeCa, 212-727-3323, postmastersart.com. (Schwendener)

★ Simon Dinnerstein: ‘The Fulbright Triptych’ (through March 31) This little-known masterpiece of 1970s realism was begun by the young Simon Dinnerstein during a Fulbright fellowship in Germany in 1971 and completed in his hometown, Brooklyn, three years later. Incorporating carefully rendered art postcards, children’s drawings and personal memorabilia; a formidable worktable laid out with printmaking tools and outdoor views; and the artist and his family, it synthesizes portrait, still life, interior and landscape and rummages through visual culture while sampling a dazzling range of textures and representational styles. It should be seen by anyone interested in the history of recent art and its oversights. German Consulate General, 871 United Nations Plaza, First Avenue, at 49th Street, 212-610-9700, germany.info/nyevents. (Smith)

★ ‘Macho Man, Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault’ (through Feb. 23) Julie Ault, an artist, writer and curator, was a founding member of the New York collaborative Group Material, which, from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, used exhibitions and public events to investigate the overlap of art and politics. During decades of depression, inflation, multiculturalism, conservatism and AIDS, she and her colleagues lived improvised lives on the city’s fringes. Within their world, art was currency for giving gifts, bartering, buying and selling among friends. This show, spread over two different locations, is a moving record of such transactions. Artists Space, 38 Greene Street, at Grand Street, SoHo; Artists Space: Books & Talks, 55 Walker Street, between Church Street and Broadway, TriBeCa, 212-226-3970, artistsspace.org. (Cotter)

★ Moira Dryer Project (through Feb. 22) The first exhibition in 20 years of the obdurate yet romantic wood-panel paintings of Moira Dryer (1957-92) is a two-part affair that is especially relevant at a time when younger painters, many of them women, are exploring new ways of getting physical with their medium. Dryer pitted the literalness of her paintings against thin, sometimes streaky applications of paint for results that are witty and startling, assertive yet suffused with a delicate, even poetic atmosphere. A lively group show of paintings or painting-like works by six artists at the gallery’s second space (at 195 Chrystie Street near Stanton) confirms the current relevance of Dryer’s art. Eleven Rivington, two Lower East Side locations: 11 Rivington Street, 212-982-1930; 195 Chrystie Street, near Stanton Street, 212-477-2507, elevenrivington.com. (Smith)

★ ‘An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle’ (through March 29) If you were young, gifted and odd, San Francisco was a good place to be in the years after World War II, when big changes were brewing in American art and culture. And this show feels like a chunk of Bay Area turf has been lifted from back then and set down, untrimmed and buzzing, in the New York of now. At its center are two gay men, the poet Robert Duncan (1919-88) and the artist Jess Collins (who went by the single name Jess). Committed partners living in a wonderland of an old house filled to roof with art, they gathered a fascinating creative community around them, and a lot of it shows up here. Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village, 212-998-6780, nyu.edu/greyart. (Cotter)

★ Carnegie Museum of Art: 2013 Carnegie International (through March 16) A welcome shock to the system of one of the art world’s more entrenched rituals, this lean, seemingly modest, thought-out exhibition takes the big global survey of contemporary art off steroids. It is mostly devoid of the looming, often expensive installations called “festival art,” while evincing a gratifying affinity for color, form, beauty and pleasure, and a discernible lack of interest in finger-wagging didacticism. Object-making of all kinds seems healthy, as do artist-initiated activist projects (which sometimes overlap). Interventionist and artist-as-curator efforts? Not as impressive. 4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, 412-622-3131, carnegieinternational.org. (Smith)

National Gallery of Art: ‘Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium From Greek Collections’ (through March 2) With about 170 objects, this show takes a processional sweep through Byzantine art from its Greco-Roman beginnings to its multicultural late phase in the 15th century, with a specific emphasis on its development in Greece itself. The history is fascinating, and the objects couldn’t be more beautiful, including a glinting 13th-century icon of the Virgin and Child pieced together from glass, silver, gold and glass; a 17-foot-long parchment scroll painted with chirping birds and secret prayers; and a heavenly silk embroidery, found stashed away in a Thessaloniki church, depicting the body of the dead Christ surrounded by fan-wielding seraphs and a stitched chant, “Holy, holy, holy.” On the National Mall, between Third and Seventh Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, 202-737-4215, nga.gov. (Cotter)

Last Chance

Julien Bismuth: ‘An image as the _____ of a surface’ (closes next Friday) As the show’s title suggests, Julien Bismuth is concerned not only with how images are made, but also with their relationship to surfaces. Pink mesh silk screens sit on the floor, leaning against the wall, sometimes stacked like an archive. Above them are images printed in dark gray ink directly onto the wall. Two videos focus on what we experience privately in the realm of images, and an audio work features an actress reading “statements of intention” by artists, pop stars and others. Ripped from context, intentions mean nothing. Here they serve as poetic reminders of the great synapse between art and experience. Simone Subal, 131 Bowery, at Grand Street, second floor, Lower East Side, 917-409-0612, simonesubal.com. (Schwendener)

★ Bronx Museum of the Arts: ‘Tony Feher’ (closes on Sunday) Almost anything can be beautiful if it’s presented in the right way. That’s where the sculptor Tony Feher comes in. His palette consists almost entirely of cheap manufactured objects, including glass and plastic bottles; metal and plastic bottle tops; marbles, coins, nuts and bolts, metal rings, plastic bags, broken pieces of glass, rope, plastic cord, shredded paper, cans and cardboard boxes. He organizes these and other things into simple but surprisingly exciting, often funny configurations with intriguing philosophical implications. This beautiful show surveys a 25-year career. 1040 Grand Concourse, at 165th Street, Morrisania, 718-681-6000, bronxmuseum.org. (Johnson)

★ ‘Devotion: Excavating Bob Mizer’ (closes on Saturday) Bob Mizer is best known as a producer and publisher of beefcake photography for a gay market. This show makes a good case for him as an artist with interests and an imagination considerably more expansive than what his popular reputation suggests. The show’s first picture is of a Siamese cat on a sofa. Further on are Arbus-like portraits of women and children; photographs of odd staged events like a magic show; and a picture of a cop writing a parking ticket for a group of teenage girls that could have been made into a painting by Norman Rockwell. A spirit of good-humored generosity prevails. 80WSE, New York University, 80 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village, 212-998-5747, steinhardt.nyu.edu/80wse. (Johnson)

★ Lori Ellison (closes on Sunday) Art is always something made from nothing, these small drawings and paintings exalt. They build on little more than doodles that are carefully cultivated and meditatively repeated — always freehand — until they form a fluctuating network or pattern. The motifs come equally from nature, geometry and instinct: worms, cells, flowers, triangles, eyes and circles-within-squares are among the words they bring to mind without accounting for their mesmerizing yet adamantly modest effects. McKenzie Fine Art Inc., 55 Orchard Street, near Grand Street, Lower East Side, 212-989-5467, mckenziefineart.com. (Smith)

★ Saul Fletcher (closes on Saturday) This photographer’s studio wall has long served him as both a backdrop and a canvas, a surface on which to draw or pose models or pin up Arte Povera-ish arrangements of leaves, fabric scraps and other found objects. In his latest photographs, small, scrappily poetic, mainly black-and-white prints, two smudgy markings on the wall serve as comfortingly familiar bookends for a series of living and dead subjects: wilted flowers, a Shaker-style chair, a plucked pigeon, friends and family members, and a pet dog. Anton Kern Gallery, 532 West 20th Street, Chelsea, 212-367-9663, antonkerngallery.com. (Rosenberg)

★ Ulrike Müller: ‘Weather’ (closes on Sunday) The latest paintings from this wide-ranging artist are small, compressed and built to last, being baked enamel on steel. Using two to five colors and a flexible geometric vocabulary that doesn’t rule out the human body, they conjure shifting conditions of light, complementary shadows and even the coming of a full moon. The colors could be less muted, but that is just one of many possibilities opened in this impressive show. Callicoon Fine Arts, 124 Forsyth Street, near Delancey Street, Lower East Side, 212-219-0326, callicoonfinearts.com. (Smith)

Jackie Nickerson: ‘Terrain’ (closes on Saturday) Jackie Nickerson works in a traditional social documentary format, and her photographs ripple with politics, particularly around the issues of food production, agribusiness and labor. She upsets one of documentary’s central tenants, however, by photographing farm workers in southern and eastern Africa holding the materials and tools of their trades. Tobacco or banana leaves or plastic crates obscure their faces and bodies. Where earlier social documentary used people as its “universal” currency, “Terrain” puts plants and work implements in the foreground, creating what might be called post-human social documentary. Jack Shainman Gallery, 513 West 20th Street, Chelsea, 212-645-1701, jackshainman.com. (Schwendener)

Davina Semo: ‘Ruder Forms Survive’ (closes on Saturday) A promising young artist overdoes it, spreading herself too thin with pat, generic results — especially when remaking the modernist monochrome in industrial-strength materials like cement, heavy chains, stainless steel mesh and acid-stained one-way mirrors. The histrionic punk-noir titles also don’t help. For a sense of her talent for creating tantalizing confusions of perception, material and emotion, turn to three small wall pieces made of brass: two metal-lined crevices redolent of armored female genitalia and archers’ slits and their ambiguously protruding opposite, a shiny bronze flange that tapers upward and outward from the wall. Marlborough Chelsea, 545 West 25th Street, 212-463-8634, marlboroughchelsea.com. (Smith)

Honza Zamojski: ‘Self Portrait With Fish’ (closes on Saturday) This promising young Polish artist returns to New York with an installation that expands the definition of “drawing in space.” Beautiful, funny and exceedingly economical, it consists of an immense, greatly attenuated, visibly male figure made of graphite-covered wood that one way or another touches all six planes of the room. His raised arms exaggerate the length of a recent catch with more than the usual Pinocchio-like effect. Andrew Kreps Gallery, 535 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, 212-741-8849, andrewkreps.com. (Smith)

Correction:

An art entry on the Listings pages on Friday and on Feb. 14 about an exhibition of paintings by Sue Williams at the 303 Gallery in Manhattan included an outdated address for the gallery, which moved last year. It is at 507 West 24th Street, not at 547 West 21st Street.